In the sense of it being the first day when the lure of the garden was almost enough to keep me from the blog. New Zealand is fond of having its seasons start promptly on the first day of the quarter. So next Sunday will be full of comments about the new season, and the radio will play a certain Vivaldi concerto, and (since the weather will be dreadful) everyone will say ‘Ha! Call this spring! Where’s this global warming, then?’ having quite forgotten today, when you can go out and look at the plum tree in blossom (in August?) and count two artichokes beginning to form, and then gather in dry washing.
September 1 is also Father’s Day which in New Zealand is indeed nine months before Mother’s Day, meaning that that particular joke falls flat. A good day not to go out for lunch, but since we’ll just be over the fortnight Wellington devotes to all things burger, that may be no bad thing. Independent regulars will know that the strange names participating cafes and restaurants give to their burgers will feed into a crossword later in the year (November 8 is the date I have on it). Yesterday’s burger (Prawn Underbelly) and next Tuesday’s (The Porky-Pine) will not feature, but will give you what I suppose I’m going to call a flavour of the sort of thing that goes on.
This week’s puzzle is a Beelzebub from 2013 – I opened the box, alighted on the puzzle, and thought, well, I haven’t reproduced an old Beelzebub for a while, so… Next time round you will get a non-Enigmatic Variations puzzle, slightly in advance of a real one in October – explanations next time. There’s a Times puzzle on 5 September too, but otherwise I’m back on Fridays in the Independent after my little July jaunt around the week exploring centenaries.
Oh my, from the look of the burger site I think I will stick with waiting for the crosswords. They will, I think, be more than enough of a challenge.